Love and Fury: The Coltrane Saga, Book 4 Read Online Free Page A

caroused with had begun calling him “Snake”, and that pleased him, too. It made him sound mean, tough…like his father. Yes, he recalled proudly, Stewart Mason had been one of the bravest men in all Kentucky, and would probably be alive today if not for that goddamn Travis Coltrane.
    Anger mottled his face. He’d been very young, but he remembered all of it, remembered when they brought his pa’s body home and laid it on the kitchen table. His mother had screamed and screamed and then fainted, and young Gavin got sick to his stomach and puked all over the floor. Shot right between the eyes, Pa was. Dead center.
    Alaina Barbeau had come to the house with the men who carried Pa’s body. She’d been the one to tell Gavin the story of how his pa believed in one thing, Coltrane in another. She said Gavin was going to hear all kinds of stories about how his pa had been on the wrong side, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, doing terrible things, but she said he wasn’t to believe any of it. Stewart Mason, she said, was the bravest of the brave, because he’d dared to stand up for what he believed in. What he believed in was niggers in their place, and white supremacy. Gavin was never to think any other way…and Stewart’s son never had.
    His mother withered after that, lost all her will to live, and just lay down and died within a year. Gavin’s only relatives, an aunt and uncle, didn’t want him. He was too boisterous for those childless people. They decided to send him to the state orphanage, but Alaina stepped in, saying she’d never allow Stewart’s son to be raised by strangers or dependent on charity. So Gavin went to live in the big, fancy Barbeau mansion, and nothing was ever the same afterward. He found out what it was like to eat on the high side of the hog, have good clothes, never be without shoes. Alaina went away for a while, and when she came back she had Dani Coltrane with her, and, Lord, did he go into a rage. Live with the daughter of the man who’d shot his pa? Hell, no! He wouldn’t do it. He’d rather live in the orphanage, that’s exactly what he told Alaina. She slapped him, told him she never wanted to hear that kind of talk again. Dani couldn’t help who her father was. She was Alaina’s sister’s daughter, and a Barbeau, and that was all that mattered.
    Well, it had taken some getting used to, but Gavin learned to get along. And as Dani and he grew older, he started to like what he saw. She radiated a quiet, gentle beauty. Her eyes were the color of coffee laced with the richest cream. Her gleaming hair was the color of vibrant cinnamon. Her body ripened into sheer delectability, and Gavin was constantly struggling with himself to refrain from attacking the sweet, succulent fruit.
    During their growing-up years, Alaina’s father died, and Alaina rapidly mismanaged the family estate until they were almost broke. So when Count Claude deBonnett proposed, they all heaved sighs of relief and moved to France with him. DeBonnett owned a fancy château perched on a cliff along the Maritime Alps, on the Mediterranean, near Monaco.
    Those first years; Gavin was terribly homesick. All he wanted was to go home to Kentucky, but he eventually settled down, and even began to see the benefits of his new life. Thanks to Prince Charles III granting a charter thirty-three years ago to build a gambling casino, Monaco—or Monte Carlo, as the Prince wanted it called—became a luxuriously beautiful playground for the world’s wealthy. Life there was exciting, glamorous, and Gavin loved it. He stopped thinking about returning to America, and began to dwell on how it would be when he was old enough to indulge in all that was available.
    Gavin recalled with a wave of disgust that the Count developed a penchant for gambling at the casino, and when he got himself killed in a duel, just a year ago, it was revealed that he’d lost most of his fortune. Since then, Alaina had barely been squeaking by on what was